The Stans 2026

 Today was essentially a bus day, travelling into Kazakhstan. Other than the time looking at highways, we're only seeing one city in Kazakhstan, Almaty. While Almaty is the biggest city, this is a very big country so I'm not sure that I can say we'll know much about it by the time we leave. We started by driving an hour or so to the border. This turned out to be  a random-seeming point on the highway, on the middle of a wide flat plain. It really makes you wonder how they decide where these borders should be. We showed our passports, put our bags through the x-ray machine, but it was actually the quickest and easiest border we've encountered so far. Then we got on a new bus and carried on. We're really on the steppe now, so it's mostly flat with some distant mountains. After another hour or so we reached Charyn Canyon, which was quite impressive and seems to be a significant tourist attraction. Like our stops yesterday, it seems to be all about what you can make...

 Not a lot happened today, which was fine really. It was essentially driving from the yurt camp on the south shore of Issyk Kul to Karakol at the eastern end. This was kind of painful; they seem to be upgrading most of the roads and so it was all uneven, gravelly potholed roads the whole way, just interupted by short sections where they'd got around to sealing it. It was still scenic - you can just see the north side of the lake where there is a continuous line of snow-capped mountain tops paralleling the shore. We stopped a couple of times at sort-of-scenic points (which involved turning up narrower but equally bumpy roads). The first time it was around eroded sand gullies. The second time there were large red rocks. Both were actually busy with tourists because this is apparently the touristy part of the country. As well as locals coming to the lake in summer, people come to hike in the mountains and there are snow fields in winter. It was about 3pm when we eventually reached Kar...